isaac-deutscher-the-prophet-armed-trotsky-1879-1921

IN SEARCH OF AN IDEAL 55
-No, replies the unhumbled optimist: You-you are only the
present.
After four and a half years of prison and exile Bronstein
longed for a scene of action broader than the Siberian colonies.
In the summer of Igo2, the underground mail brought him a
copy of Lenin's What is to be dlJne? and a file of Iskra. He read
these with mixed feelings. Here he found ideas on the shape
and character of the party, ideas which had been maturing in
him, set out with supreme confidence by the brilliant emigre
writers. The fact that he had in his backwater reached the same
conclusions independently could not but give him a thrill and
confirm him in his self-reliance. But he was intensely restless:
he could no longer bear the sight of the muddy, cobblestoned,
narrow streets of Verkholensk. Even the arguments
within the colonies of deportees and his literary successes with
the Eastern Review filled him with boredom. If only he could
get away to Moscow or Petersburg ... and then perhaps to
Geneva, Munich, or London, the centres where the intellectual
weapons of the revolution were being forged ....
He shared his impatience and his secret ambition with his
wife. Alexandra had no doubt that her husband was destined to
greatness, and that at twenty-three it was time for him to do
something for immortality. She urged him to try to escape
from Siberia and in doing so she shouldered the burden of a
heavy sacrifice. She had just given birth to their second daughter
and was now undertaking to struggle for her own and her
children's lives, unaided, with no certainty of a reunion. In her
own conviction she was, as his wife and as a revolutionary,
merely doing her duty; and she took her duty for granted without
the slightest suggestion of melodrama. 1
On a summer night in Igo2, Bronstein, hidden under loads
of hay in a peasant cart rumbling along bumpy Siberian fields,
was on his way to Irkutsk. In his bed, in the loft of his house at
Verkholensk, there lay the dummy of a man. Next evening
the police inspector who came, as usual, to check whether the
Bronsteins were in, climbed a ladder to the loft, glanced at the
bed and, satisfied that everything was in order, went away. In
1
L. Trotsky, Moya .{'/ri;:rr, vol. i, p. 157; Ziv, op. cit., p. 42; M. Eastman, op. cit.,
PP· 142-3.